


watch the sun rise, run in the shadows

by jeannedarc



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: (Or is it?), Horror, Infidelity, M/M, Magical Realism, Marriage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:48:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21567898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jeannedarc/pseuds/jeannedarc
Summary: Ten and Taeyong, six months from being married, build themselves a home, glittering and golden, between the mountains. It is filled with music, and life, and terror.
Relationships: Lee Taeyong/Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul | Ten
Comments: 15
Kudos: 54





	watch the sun rise, run in the shadows

**Author's Note:**

> HOWDY
> 
> soooooooo i did it, i did the thing, a thing i swore i'd never do  
> several things i swore i'd never do, honestly  
> i hope you, the reader, like it at least half as much as i liked writing it, because honestly i had a great time, and was surprised at the ending even as the person writing it!
> 
> big thanks to maddie, kes, and elle for sitting with me while i worked it out  
> almost as big of thanks to everyone who voted in my dumb daily polls and Insisted i bang this one out quickly

Six months before the wedding, Taeyong came home in a flurry, proclaiming that he had something to show Ten, but that it’d take awhile. His hair -- then this awful shade of gunmetal grey, but faded so that he looked like something ancient, beautiful, unspeakable -- was windswept, letting Ten know he'd been driving with the top down on his convertible. He'd been driving again. 

That did not bode well, in Ten’s experience. 

Ten put down his book, untucked his warm feet from beneath himself, pushed his wire-rimmed glasses further up his nose -- all the better with which to study Taeyong, he supposed. His cheeks were that obscene shade of red usually reserved for the bedroom, something private and thrilling all at once; his eyes, fathomless and dark and beautiful, glittered like every shiny thing Ten had ever denied himself.

Ten, of course, had been sceptical, because nothing good ever came from this borderline mania that Taeyong sometimes exhibited, but found himself climbing into the passenger’s seat anyway.

The drive was even longer than Taeyong's promise could have told him. The mountain pass was treacherous, and Taeyong insisted on taking every turn as slowly as he could. They crawled up the mountainside in their city-conscious sedan, knowing the entire while that should they make this journey again, they'd have to get something better adapted than something that forced Taeyong into that bloodless, tight-knuckle grip on the steering wheel.

His eyes hadn't lost that sparkle, but his face had turned paper-white to match his hands as they squenched at the leather beneath them.

Every time Ten thought they would not climb any higher, another hill crested before them, until Taeyong stopped, turned off onto a dirt road that lead between two mountain feet, the path lined with trees, the lack of paving sending Ten into a dizzy spell as the car rocked unsteady beneath him. "Are you trying to get me to live out that dream of fucking in public?" asked Ten, dreamy, a smirk curling smoky at the corners of his catlike mouth. "It doesn't count if no one is up here to hear us, y'know." And he leaned over, wrapping those grinning lips around the piercing that hung low in Taeyong's ear.

Smiling something similar, Taeyong batted at Ten, trying to fend him off, not really caring if he got his fill in this moment. "I just wanted to show you this," he intoned, fond if exasperated. "I want you to see it. It's kind of a dream."

The car beneath them came to a rattling stop, and Taeyong took a moment to finally breathe as he put it in park. Ten watched him, the way the silver sunlight, high in the sky but threatening to crash down round their ears, caught Taeyong's profile, and wondered what could possibly be more beautiful than this.

And then, Taeyong climbed from the car, coming round to open Ten's door for him, earning himself a playful glare. "Don't play gentleman," Ten chided him, waggling a finger, though he could never be angry with Taeyong. "What do you want to show me?"

Taeyong led in silence, bouncing on the balls of his feet, more excited with each and every step. The path eventually became loose gravel, and the foliage that had lined their ride between the mountains thinned some before opening up to a clearing. It was then that Ten realised: all this travel, the secrecy, was worth it to see the way Taeyong lit up when he caught sight of the lifeless yellow dinosaurs, aged slightly but still functional, poised to dig up already broken ground.

"Baby?" asked Ten, tentative as he circled round to finally catch Taeyong's eye the way it'd been done to him.

Taeyong, in turn, turned to him, grinning from ear to blushing ear, skin still stinging with the promise of Ten's mouth. He gestured to the space between the machines, the piles of fill dirt soon to occupy some other mountain, some pit that reminded Ten of a home he hadn’t seen in years. "I bought this land a little while ago," Taeyong said, breathless, enthusiasm filling him to the brim once again, his brilliance blocking out Ten’s dark. "I didn't think anything would happen to it, or if it did it would be something for my parents. But I've been talking to them, and they want to stay where they're at when they finally retire, and they told me...well, they told me to keep it. I've been driving back and forth between here and town all week, checking on things, and I think...I don’t know, babe, it seems like it’ll be the best place for us. For you."

Ten blinked a couple times, not sure that he was understanding correctly. "What do you mean?"

Taeyong took Ten's hands in his, squeezed them tight. "This is going to be our home."

After a beat of hesitation, and before Taeyong's face had the chance to fall, Ten slung his arms round Taeyong's neck, drew him in close, kissed him all along his cheekbone and up to his temple. He laughed in spite of himself. And here, for a moment, he thought he'd climbed this mountain to die.

Their wedding was in six months. Ten had plotted out all the details, and had gotten a start when he'd accidentally found the receipts for Taeyong's overly romantic proposal. He'd hand-crafted their guest list, done research on the best bands and the most scenic venues, planned a cocktail menu to absolutely die for and written his vows to Taeyong himself. This was simply more in the way of customisation, another item on an already long to-do list. Stop his uncle from making an embarrassing toast at the reception, remember to pick up the sparklers and remind Taeyong to go to the tailor to get his measurements redone because his suit didn't fit right and oh, yeah, get to work on what the inside of their house would look like.

There, in that moment, Ten had never been more in love with anyone than he was with Taeyong. Waiting a year for the already sure proposal had been the smartest and most wondrous thing he'd ever done.

"When will the house be built?" asked Ten, tipping his head, peering at Taeyong from beneath his too-long eyelashes.

"That's the best part," murmured Taeyong, taking Ten's face in his palms, stroking his thumbs along the apples of his fiancé's cheeks. "I'll get you in touch with the contractor, of course, because I know you'll want to put a lot of touches on the interior if you get the chance, but the estimate is that it'll be done during our honeymoon, if you don't change anything enormous."

Ten grinned, already coming up with little touches of his own, thinking of his work space, of Taeyong's, of all the shiny new surfaces they'd have sex on in their first year of marriage.

Over his head, the wind howled its aching, lonesome song. Ten was not sure he could learn to like the mountains, but he certainly loved Taeyong, and would do anything to keep that safe. Still, there was some distance in those endless eyes of his, and Ten watched, mournful, bottom lip poking out as Taeyong wandered the site of their future.

///

He did not, in fact, like the mountains.

This should have been obvious to literally anyone, including himself, but he didn’t think about that, too caught up in their romance, in the beauty of finally having a home of their own. All those years of struggle and finally, finally they’d be alone, not sharing walls with strangers who liked to throw loud parties, or listen in on their 3am sex sessions when they actually had the wherewithal to conduct them.

There was nothing Ten liked more than being alone, with Taeyong.

Still, living so remotely had its nightmares, its challenges. Their yard was threatened by old maples who tottered a little too far to one side when it was windy, which was all the time. It took half an hour to get to the nearest store worth buying from, forty-five when they needed something for work. Service people didn’t like to come out; they’d gotten pretty adept at jerry-rigging whatever fixes they needed in terms of their electric, their plumbing, their internet, while waiting the two days it took some expert or another to decide the call would be worth it. Taeyong always looked so good working with his hands, and Ten wasn’t bad at it after the first few times.

The house itself was perfect. Room for a study, should either of them need privacy for work. Ten had a studio they’d made out of their basement, two mirrored walls, a barre in case he felt like he could get away with seducing Taeyong into paying him a visit in the middle of a slow work day. He’d spent long enough monetizing dance tutorials that they could afford for him to take a break.

Taeyong spent his days in the office, composing track after track, selling his songs to the priciest pop stars. His latest piece had sold to Haechan, an incredible soloist, young, new on the scene. He’d let Ten listen to it, Taeyong had, always shy about his compositions but happy to share with the love of his life. They’d fucked right there on the desk as soon as Taeyong had mentioned whose reps had bought the rights, nearly knocked one of Taeyong’s expensive computers to the floor in their fervour to touch one another.

It wasn’t all bad. Ten just still hadn’t learned, but he would in time.

///

Their shiny new house, Ten discovered one morning, had come down with a case of bugs. He’d opened the cabinet to fix himself an early morning snack, having left Taeyong hiding beneath the covers to catch a bit more sleep; the door seemed to spill forth with a dozen little creepy crawlies. Ten jumped back, astonished, nearly collapsing to the floor beneath him.

He wasn’t afraid of them, per se, being the braver of the pair of them, but then that didn’t make him a fan. And that was fine; there were professionals to deal with that. He’d called up the exterminator in the still, hazy morning, leaning against their kitchen counter. Quartz, in peacock blue marbled with gold. He’d chosen it himself, having been given free reign when they’d decided to build themselves a place.

“It’s funny,” the exterminator told him, his voice crackling over the line like something was keeping them apart besides the endless string of wires between here and somewhere. “We don’t get a lot of calls up that way. It’s hard to infest a house when nothing is there.”

He canceled their appointment, figured it was just him being dramatic. An echo of friends he didn’t have anymore.

When Taeyong woke, barefoot, bare-chested, dressed only in sweats, Ten explained the problem. Taeyong’s not like to fix anything before the sun is hanging high in the sky — his temperament is a delicate one, after all — but he listens, quiet, while his coffee brewed over ice.

“Did you call someone?” he asked, half into his second cup.

“They said there’s no reason for us to have bugs, but,” and Ten, being the disgusting little shit that he was, held up a shoe he’d used to smash one across the cabinet. He’d never been so grateful for the relatively dark finish of their cabinet doors, not that the insect guts had stuck well to it anyway.

Taeyong grimaced, finished the last of his coffee, the ice clinking loudly in the glass, breaking the brief stretch of silence between them. “What do you think we should do?”

Ten shrugged. “I don’t even know what kind of bugs they are.”

Taeyong looked out the window. The day was still a grey one. The weather called for rain. “I’ll figure something out,” he told Ten, “but I have work to do first.” He got up from his spot at the breakfast bar, kissed the corner of his husband’s mouth, gently dragged fingers through his already messy hair. “Love you. Come check on me if I don’t come out in two hours.”

“I always do,” said Ten to Taeyong’s retreating back, unsure that he’d spoken at all.

///

The bugs kept coming. Ten woke one morning to wash his face, brush his teeth, only to find a couple of them crawling up the sink drain, a handful nestling in their bar of soap, two fists' worth threatening their toothbrush holder. He complained loudly, banging with a fist on the doorframe to the bathroom, and knew full well Taeyong couldn't hear him between there and the office. He stormed across the house, the distance seeming insurmountable in this, his time of crisis.

He leaned in the doorway, the palm of his hand pressed to the pricey paneled glass of the door. "Baby, we have to do something about these bugs."

"What bugs?" Taeyong was already slipping out of his oversized headphones, and fuck, but he looked so cute in them, so small in his oversized hoodie, the zipper hanging down to reveal he hadn't bothered dressing underneath. Now, Ten knew, was not the time to be distracted by how hot he found his husband. Not that he could help himself. "The bugs. Right. Um. You said you called someone, but we never heard back from them."

"Yeah, I told them not to bother, since it was such a burden on them, coming up here and taking our hard-earned money." Ten rolled his eyes, biting back another handful of snide remarks. Something tickled the top of his bare foot; he glanced down to see that it was a bug, and yelled out his indignation, and stumbled a step back.

Taeyong, lightning-quick and glowing with Ten's interruption, made a move to go to Ten, help him, but Ten merely waved him away. "These fucking things..." he mumbled, tip of his tongue caught between his teeth. Taeyong appeared at his side anyway, and the gentle curve of his neck was exposed beneath the collar of his hoodie.

There, on his skin, Ten could see a mark he couldn't remember having made, faintly purple, beautiful set against the pale of Taeyong's skin. He thought to question it, but they'd fucked so much since moving in that he couldn't remember if it was one of the casualties of their overly enthusiastic sex life.

"Are you okay?" Taeyong asked, and the wound to Ten's pride was something he couldn't stomach just yet. He climbed to his feet without assistance, brushed imaginary dirt onto his knees. "Just take it easy, babe, you know how you can get..." And he took Ten's neck between his hands, thumbed over his pulse, careful, like Ten was something porcelain and priceless.

Perhaps, he thought as he tipped up his chin, he was.

"I'm going to call an exterminator, and the contractor," said Ten, not at all placated by the gesture offered him. "There has to be something wrong with the house if we've got bugs this soon."

Taeyong, unable to say anything in defense of the house he'd dreamed into being, just nodded, dotting a kiss to Ten's temple before letting him go.

The office window, Ten noted, was open. Funny. It was always cold in here, and yet Taeyong couldn't seem to cool down.

///

Late at night, when Ten was wracked with worry about what else could possibly go wrong up here, he could swear he heard music, a child's laughter. He would get up and out of bed -- Taeyong was working late again, deadlines always doing a number on his psyche -- and wander the floorboards in slippered feet. He would wrap up in one of those comically large blankets Taeyong had insisted on adding to their guest registry months and months before; its tail would drag on the floor and, invariably, spook him with its noise. He was liable to trip. A regular somnambulist, he supposed himself, though his mind was his own and his thoughts were racing faster than he could have anticipated.

He knew the house better than Taeyong did, having designed its interior entirely, knew that the enormous bay window in the sitting room provided him ample view into the woods that stretched, piney and endless, behind their backyard. He watched them now, curled in the window seat with his legs tucked beneath him, as they swayed, spraying greying needles into the wind. They moved, and groaned, as any forest should.

The music did not abate, only faded a fraction when he moved, morose, from the window into the kitchen, ignoring the bugs. The exterminator had been called. The contractor had apologised profusely, offered to settle out of court. Still, the bugs came. Nothing seemed to stop them.

Everything here smelled of something he could not place, but he wrinkled his nose anyway.

When he wandered out of the kitchen, toward the study, draped in muted gold and blue -- a theme through the house, though Ten had not intended it -- his cape dragging along with him. He tripped over its edge once, tripped again over the threshold, remembering the night after they'd moved, the way Taeyong, tipsy on champagne neither of them had any right buying let alone drinking, had jokingly carried him in. Ten had whined even as Taeyong kissed his neck, promised to fuck him up against the wall, both still drunk on their honeymoon, on one another.

He'd fallen right to sleep that night. Less than a year later, and he can't sleep no matter what he does.

Outside, the wind picked up; he could see it in the trees, their waving a greeting to his fitful mind that matched his fretful, frail frame. Just beyond the window, so close Ten swore he could snatch the vision right out of the air, he caught a flash of pink in the moonlight.

Taeyong.

Ten's heart stuttered out a question in his chest. He did not know the words to answer it.

There was Taeyong, dressed in almost nothing, his chest bare and catching the light in a way that Ten might once have found gorgeous, but now just made him ill. There was no one else on the mountain, and it was freezing outside. Ten watched as he walked, slow and careful, a path he seemed not to know. He noted the dirt on the soles of Taeyong's feet.

Where was he going?

But then, Ten realised all at once that he could not possibly do anything to stop him, Taeyong being prone to these spells, these moments where all he could do was feed into whatever voice in his head told him to do these wild things. The life of an artist, they'd agreed a hundred times over. Everyone draws inspiration from somewhere. Taeyong had to be with the trees, and that was fine.

Still, the music continued, a faint chime on the wind, practically blown away by the force of it but audible all the same. In a hurry Ten dropped his blanket, leaving it abandoned on the study floor and going to Taeyong's office.

The window, he noted, was still open.

He closed it. The music did not cease, but he leaned his temple against the glass as he latched it, heart racing, still trying to parse out the question it was trying to ask.

Hours later, the music stopped. It took some time, a shower in their master bedroom, but eventually Taeyong climbed into bed with Ten, wrapped around him, mouth all hot and wanting. Ten rolled away, groaning protests about how he'd been asleep.

They stayed wrapped around each other, and Ten let his hands wander, lazy and pleased to have his husband back. He felt every notch in Taeyong’s spine, and while he’d always been thin, the dancer’s diet something to which they both adhered, he’d never worried Ten before. Ten had never slipped fingers between the burning-hot irons of Taeyong’s ribs until tonight, never been able to, never wanted to bake a cake just for the sake of eating one.

In the dark, Taeyong's eyes flashed, bright and zealous, and Ten kissed him goodnight, brow knotting as he caught sight of something he hadn’t been able to see a moment prior.

At the base of Taeyong's throat was a mark Ten knew he could not have made, mottled purple and slick with something Ten hoped to hell was sweat. It was dented the way that golf balls were, like a dozen little teeth had gotten into Taeyong's skin, never quite breaking but lingering all the same.

His heart finally found that question, but he could not bring himself to answer.

///

The exterminator came a full week after Ten had finally scheduled the appointment. He'd been all apologies even as he followed Ten around the house, taking note of the particular problem areas and poking his head into various cabinets. Ten gave him a pass because he was beyond handsome, and because he was sure that there was some neighbour on the other side of the woods that was fucking his husband.

He hadn't been able to confront Taeyong, having been busy throwing himself into work and Taeyong having done the same, but he was thinking about it long and hard, looking for the right words to say. A part of him wanted to be vengeful, to say he was leaving this stupid fucking mountain, but...he loved Taeyong. He had never loved anything or anyone the way he did that man.

Some nights he still heard the music. Some nights he almost convinced himself that waiting at the front door ready to lick Taeyong's filthy, bare foot was the only way to fix this. Hadn't he been good? Hadn't he made them a beautiful home, and made himself available even when he didn't want to be? Hadn't he done enough?

The exterminator -- Johnny, his name was, and he was all long hair tied back in a ponytail and a backwards ball cap that definitely lent to his rugged, bug-murdering exterior -- had been taking notes the entire time he'd toured the house, and when he was finished he brushed off his hands. "Are you sure you've seen these bugs?" he asked, and Ten bit down hard on the inside of his cheek in order to keep from scoffing out his umbrage. "I'm not saying you're wrong, because you've seen what you've seen. Please don't think I think you're crazy. But what I'm trying to say is that this house is brand new and there's no way anything got in by some unusual means."

Unusual means. Ten wanted to laugh, to cry, to take Johnny by his stupid fucking jumpsuit and scream in his face. But none of that would fix any of Ten's problems, and so he did not, despite the urge rising up in him, bile and phlegm that he could not seem to be rid of these days. "Doesn't every house run the risk of bugs?"

Johnny just shrugged. “I can set up traps, but only if you let me hang out here a little while and figure out what traps need to be brought in.”

Ten, indifferent to his own plight, thought of his crumbling marriage, of the way Taeyong’s hands had roughly held him open and the fingerprint bruises still on his ass. He was a shambles of inappropriate thought, he noted, schooling his face into something impassive, something admirable. “Hang out as long as you like,” he sniffed, “I’ll be in my room.”

Outside, in broad daylight, the music started again. Ten moaned his distress as he went to Taeyong’s office to let him know what was happening in the rest of the world.

The window was open. Taeyong sat at his desk with his head on its smooth surface, the polished wood a beautiful contrast to him. The mark at his throat had disappeared, though Ten couldn’t say that he missed it. “The guy, uh, the bug guy is going to hang out here for a bit, figure out what he needs to do about the bugs.”

Taeyong didn’t move, didn’t even acknowledge that Ten had said anything at all. His enormous eyes darted back and forth, pupils dilated, lips slightly parted as if mouthing along with some song that Ten did not know. It seemed a countermelody to the music that streamed in through the open window.

"Baby?" Ten took a tentative step toward the desk, hand outstretched. Taeyong snapped to, a violent thing, a shake of his shoulders and a roll of his neck in quick succession. He blinked once, twice, gazing up at Ten from his seat, mouth still moving, remnant trance forcing it into its own accord. "Baby, what's wrong?"

"I think I fell asleep." Taeyong blinked a few more times, unable to snap to himself all in one go. The same was true of his sleep, infrequent and irrational. Ten knew this well. All at once the lies were forgotten in favour of this one.

"You weren't asleep. You were singing. You just stared off into space." Ten couldn't keep his worry at bay. He crossed the remaining space between them. He put a hand on Taeyong's shoulder, fingertips trailing along the curve of his neck, a comfort often given, rarely eschewed.

Taeyong only shook him away. "No, stop, please," he whined, slumping over onto his desk again. "Tell me again what I was doing." Ten, impatient, repeated himself, watching, waiting for recognition to pass over Taeyong's features. "I don't understand."

Ten didn't say it reminded him of the one time he'd seen some stranger on a public bus fall out into a grand mal seizure, but he wanted to, and that was what mattered. "Is everything okay? You've been sleeping less lately."

Taeyong almost looked ready to respond when his train of thought was interrupted. Johnny stood in the doorway, clearing his throat. "Hi. Sorry. Can I talk to you?" He looked at Ten, then, something significant and concerned in the way he seemed to tuck his hands into his pockets the way other people might hoard secrets. Ten tottered out after him, but not after glancing over Taeyong a final time, checking for more of those phantom marks, for some sign that he would or would not be okay.

In the hallway, Johnny looked him up and down, tongue dragging uncertainly over his bottom lip. "I haven't seen anything yet," he says, and Ten had to fight to keep himself from going off, the way a younger version of himself might have. Everything nagged at him at once, and the nausea slowly returned, and he knew there was something he had to do to fix this, just didn't know what it might be. "I'm not saying they're not real, because you seem like a rational person, but...is it at all possible?"

And fuck, there was something so calm and reasonable in Johnny's tone that Ten began to wonder whether or not it had been some sort of dream.

He held up his hands, stared into the diamond on his wedding ring, and shook his head. "I don't know anymore." From the other room, he could hear Taeyong humming along with the music that had pitched up outside the open window. A shudder passed through him, phantasmic and chilling, and he looked up at Johnny, a plea at the tip of his tongue, fated only to get trapped behind his teeth.

Johnny, in all his sympathy, just nodded. "I'll see what I can do." He trawled back down the length of the hallway. Ten watched him go, fighting a battle of the highest magnitude to keep himself from crying.

///

Late at night, when Ten thought Taeyong was sleeping but couldn't be sure, he would take to the balcony over their spare bedroom, pluck at the flowers growing in the trellis, pruning them so that they might take better shape. He watched the ground below as he did this, and in time the flowers were bare, naked, raw as he felt.

Most nights, Taeyong passed beneath him, taken by the same trance that had shown itself during his time in his office. Ten tried to ignore it, just write it off as another quirk, but the more time passed, the more he could convince himself that there was something terribly wrong with his husband, with their marriage, with _himself_.

The regret bubbled up with his tears, and he finally lost that battle.

Like a widowed woman, Ten plucked the flowers until there was nothing left, until he was tearing the stems between his fingertips.

///

It'd been weeks since Taeyong had come to Ten for sex. In Ten's estimation it was just another sign that he was cheating. Every time Ten approached him, drenched in sweat from another video well done, another day of work completed, Taeyong was sitting before that damn computer, working at some sound file or another the likes of which Ten couldn't read and didn't care to.

"I'm working," Taeyong would say, never once looking up. He bloomed, now, the flower that Ten had destroyed. The marks were deeper every time Taeyong went wandering. Ten was keeping inventory.

"Are you seeing someone else?" Ten finally asked, when he'd had enough of doubting himself, needed confirmation to continue his self-flagellation, the scars left on his spirit not deep enough already. "Because I know I'm not the best person to be married to, but you're... you aren't yourself." He tried to take Taeyong's hand in his own, and sighed when he was rebuffed, Taeyong drawing in on himself, becoming something small, shriveled, ugly. "If there's something I can do..."

"There's nothing." Taeyong looked up at him, and the hollows beneath his eyes were so deep and so dark that Ten could've mistaken him for a ghoul. "Really. You're fine. I just have a lot of projects going on right now. Please stop blaming yourself for something that doesn't have anything to do with you." He stood suddenly, knocking the chair in which he'd sat out from beneath him, and while it clattered to the floor he took Ten's face in his hands, kissed him for all the life in both their bodies.

Strange how he tastes of honey and wildflowers and pine needles. He became something bitter. Ten kissed him back regardless, arms winding around his waist as he sobbed into Taeyong's mouth.

///

They spent a Thursday afternoon with a doctor. Ten wrung his hands anxiously as he watched Taeyong speak with his own, the dirt still caked in the cracks of his palms and ridged fingertips, the tiny, dented splotches of purple between the veins on his wrist.

That same doctor, a fucking idiot judging by the way he fumbled with his file folder, put up brain scans on the screen. He pointed to random blots on the photo of the inside of Taeyong's skull. He explained the different parts of the brain. Ten did not listen, trying to take in the big picture rather than the details, not too interested in learning about his husband's amygdala if he could think of him as human instead.

"What does it mean?" Taeyong asked, when the silence lingered over them a bit too long. Ten wrinkled his nose, suddenly overwhelmed by the sterile smell of the office in which they sat.

"It means there's nothing that we can find," said the doctor, clearly frazzled by the division between the two of them as they sat before him, blinking, uncomprehending. "But I might suggest coming in for something more extensive, if you can swing it."

Money was not the issue, Ten wanted to explain, though he could not possibly say those words without earning himself one of those dirty looks of which Taeyong was so fond lately. Getting Taeyong to come here without going into one of his spells was another matter entirely. Ten sighed, entire chest heaving and bowing in on himself with the effort of carrying himself and his marriage.

"We'll schedule again in a few weeks, if you're willing," the doctor goes on to explain. "There are all sorts of things that could cause this. In the meantime, have you considered seeing a psychiatrist?"

Taeyong stood suddenly, ramrod straight, and Ten was gripped tight by the hands of fear -- fear that one of the spells was going to happen here, and that he would have no more excuses with which to dismiss whatever was clearly wrong. Instead he marched from the office, and Ten sighed again, so relieved that he felt no sting of embarrassment, no pain of wounded pride.

///

The song was louder, these days. It provided an awful counter to the howling of the wind, its dolour whistling loud in Ten's ears, wrapping up just beneath the surface of his skin and setting him to crawling all over. He heard it mostly at night, though he could not say whether it was his own lack of sleep that gave him the opportunity to listen, or simply because it sang to him when the sun went down.

He hadn't had a full nights' sleep in weeks. His memory was starting to slip, as evidenced by his editor's constant but unread reminders that his videos had due dates. Johnny came back a few times, setting out traps for bugs that he didn't think existed; Ten was almost always frightened by his sudden appearance at the door.

They spent time together, seated on opposite ends of the window seat. "Do you think he's cheating on me?" asked Ten, sipping on lukewarm tea, the milk getting stuck in the back of his throat. Johnny's presence had become something of a comforting weight around the house, and his knowledge of the things that are happening a treasure, to Ten, who'd somehow managed to leave all his friends behind on this ridiculous move.

Johnny, pretending to dick around on his phone, lifted a questioning eyebrow. "I think it doesn't matter what I think, because you've come up with something else all on your own."

Nevermind, Ten fucking hated him and wished these goddamn bugs would at the very least get _better_. The music picks up, to be heard over the wind, and Ten shivers, sliding the window shut. "I don't want to think my husband would cheat, but--"

And there was a telltale flash of pink outside the window, almost telling Ten the truth his heart seemed to scream but his mind could not rationalise: that Taeyong was having one of his 'episodes' in broad daylight, when they had company.

How _fucking_ embarrassing, Ten decided, biting his tongue so he didn't say something he regretted.

"Taeyong!" he screamed, beating on the glass, careful not to crack a knuckle on the dividers between the panes. "Taeyong, stop! Come here!" But he knew full well there was no use to demanding these things from a man who was, in essence, catatonic; he scrambled to his feet, ran round to the front door, leaving Johnny to his own devices as he slipped into his shoes and dashed toward the woods in pursuit of his husband.

When he reached Taeyong's side at last, huffing and puffing like some big bad something or other, Ten bent at the waist, hands to his knees. He thought he was in better shape -- had work fallen by the wayside?

At last, he looked up, and Taeyong was staring down at him with those enormous eyes of his, but instead of the beautiful glimmer they usually had, there was nothing. No emotion. No semblance of thought.

Ten gasped, and took a step backward, tripping over an errant tree root that hadn't managed to undo him before. "Baby?" he asked, voice quaking with fear.

Taeyong spoke in many voices, and none at all. " _You will not follow me again,_ " was all that he said, and yet whatever had taken him -- possession, the spirit of the forest that surrounded them on most sides -- was so fierce, so determined, that Ten sobbed out his assent.

He ran back to the house as soon as he could, to his hand-picked tile floors and imported rugs and books upon books upon books, the things that had mattered to him when he and Taeyong had at last been wed.

When Johnny finally found him, he himself was catatonic, curled on the floor of Taeyong's office, staring out into the sky, tear tracks drying down his face.

“Do you hear the music?” he asked, staring blankly up at Johnny when he could at last speak again.

And Johnny just looked at him with the pity of a man who’s seen a thousand friends through til the end. “No,” he said, so softly that it was like a lover’s caress against Ten’s cheek. “No, I don’t hear anything at all.”

///

Taeyong did not return for a very long time, and in the interim, the sky fell bleak and blotted out on a greyed horizon. Ten, being full of need, prayed to some God in which he did not believe, and did the one thing he could think of that was more unspeakable than some affair to which Taeyong might or might not have been tethered. He slipped the cloak of shadow from around his shoulder, forced it away from his frame with the too-bright backlight of Taeyong’s laptop screen. Good thing they don’t believe in secrets, better yet that Ten knows where Taeyong keeps all his work.

Except, when he tapped to log on, the entire desktop was covered with icons. Music files. Strange names, variants on one another, just one letter different here, a symbol there. He clicked on one; it began playing, a touch tinny through the speakers, Taeyong’s headphones having come unplugged sometime between his last work session and now. Ten listened, head cocked, tongue poking out of the corner of his mouth as he tried to place the tune.

The song the mountains sang.

A shudder ran through Ten’s entire body, and his knees, planted in the rug beneath Taeyong’s desk, threatened to give out beneath him. He stayed strong, but only just, fingertips wrapped around the lip of the desk, and opened another file.

The song was the same, a note or two off. The replications weren’t perfect, didn’t capture the indelible and insidious way the song sank inside you the way it had Ten over the past few months.

Was this what drove his husband to disappearing?

File after file after file, all horrible approximations of what had slipped into their house.

Just out of the corner of his eye, Ten watched as a bug crawled closer, seeming to inspect. He turned the song up louder, letting it compete with the haunting moan of the wind as it blew through the open window. He was prickling with gooseflesh, but he could not seem to bring himself to close it. Not if this is what Taeyong needed to work, to provide, to _come home_.

Over the song, Ten heard his own name, in something like a creaking mumble, old wooden furniture that needed love and polish to be acceptable, to have a place anywhere, least of all his own home. The sound rustled him, as if he had become the trees he had come to loathe. There was, he reasoned, only one other person out this far.

Knowing what he had to do, Ten set his jaw, ignored the quivering beneath his skin, the dangerous, electric hum of his blood in his veins, and at long last left Taeyong’s office.

///

The clock on his phone said it was just past three in the morning. He used his flashlight to guide him, but he did not truly need it -- the sound of the mountain’s song could have guided him anywhere it wanted him to go. For a brief moment, Ten wondered if perhaps this is what had happened to his husband: that he had been charmed by the music and taken somewhere, replaced by something otherworldly and without explanation.

He wondered still if the marks he had become accustomed to, peppered on Taeyong’s skin, dimpled and nearly black in their darkness, were caused by whatever made the mountain sing to them. If perhaps there was more out there in the woods than could be accounted for by his knowledge. But then, Ten thought he knew a lot of things. He thought he knew how to live, and do so luxuriously, in marrying well, in seeing Taeyong through struggles. He thought he knew the way back down the mountain, having driven it more and more recently in an attempt to escape the reality of things.

He thought he knew how to keep someone. But in the end, it had been Ten who hadn’t wanted to be kept.

He crunched across the forest floor, boots sticking with animal bones and fallen twigs, intent on following the sound as far as he could. The blanket he’d worn over his half-dozen layers to fight against the wind was not enough, and trailed behind him, a cape that snagged in roots and pine needles and carried signs of the foot-beaten path with him as he approached. Behind him, the bugs, the ones he had kept with him in the house as his only company more often than he’d have liked, followed a neat, orderly line, a marching regiment of insects that Ten pretended he did not see or feel when they caught up to his hesitating heels.

Eventually, the trees thinned, and he found himself among myriad rocks that glimmered beneath strangely vibrant starlight, and the sound of the song beat its loudest in his ears. He sank to his knees, his feet no longer willing to carry him. Taeyong, he noted, was not here, not in plain sight, and neither was anyone else.

Here, alone, Ten wept, phone abandoned, blanket cape slipping from his shoulders.

Something boomed out his name, thunder that rattled his bones. The night overhead was clear; there was no storm looming on the horizon.

He closed his eyes, pressed his forehead to the murky earth beneath him, and begged for this to stop, to be over, in whatever way he could have it. He promised he would never steal again, not from someone he loved or someone he didn’t, and his shoulders shook with the sincerity of it.

And then, fingertips dusted his jawline, lips pressed against his ear, the breath ice-cold and setting him back to shuddering. “Look up, prince,” whispered a voice that Ten did not know. His head was heavy, and his neck ached, and he streamed with snot and tears he didn’t think he deserved, but Ten lifted his head anyway.

When he did, the scene before him had become one like home. A fire flickered low in a pit. There were strangers whirling arm in arm around its confines, laughing and singing, the tune something he knew too well.

“What is this?” he asked the voice, but when he turned his head to see who had told him to look upon this revelry, no one stood there at all.

Across the fire, he saw Taeyong, dancing, that mania in his eyes, his cheeks burning, something saved for the bedroom, private and thrilled all at once. His beautiful skin was pockmarked. He looked dirty, but there were flowers in his hair, and something told Ten that he had been there a long, long time.

The dark circles beneath his eyes matched the bruises that Ten could see through the thin cotton undershirt in which Taeyong had stupidly, cursedly left the house.

He drifted closer, unsure when he had risen from the damp, and reached out a hand, glittering with rings he’d never worn, toward the man he loved, the one person who did not belong here. Taeyong, though, stayed out of reach, trotting away from him in perfect rhythm with the dance.

“They used him,” said the same voice, high and soft-spoken and still yet unseen. “They used him to bring you home, and it worked. He’s beautiful. You’ve made a brilliant choice in pet.”

“Pet,” he echoed, hollow. Ten sobbed, clutching at his chest. He did not understand anything, and the fire was so hot it threatened to claw through his skin. Still, his bones were cold, and he was taking in so much. The bodies seemed to multiply endlessly and, when he caught them from the corner of his eye, their faces were unsettling, too many eyes, skin in a colour which was by no measure human and he could swear he caught the gentle glimmer of dragonfly wings.

Something in his ribcage pulled to them. 

One approached, offered him a glass of wine. In the reflected surface of the drink he saw a circlet, glinting with a single amethyst, reflected upon his head. This was not him, he who plotted meticulously even for the thing that would have very well ended his marriage, his comfortable life, his heart. He lifted his eyes to ask where it came from, and a blond thing, gorgeous and gossamer, swept to his side. “How may I help you, your highness?” He -- for Ten trusted it was a man, and not some illusion sent to torture him -- offered a smile, but he had the same dark circles under his eyes that Ten had seen in Taeyong not too long ago. “Is there something that you need?”

“What is this?” Ten demanded, quavering.

The blond just laughed, and tipped his head, full lips quirking into a smile that contained all the sadness Ten had ever felt, all the otherness that he had ever experienced. “Why, your highness, this is your welcome home,” he singsonged, and dragged a feather-light touch down the length of Ten’s nose. “It has been so long since your family have seen you.”

“My family?” he repeated, and the reverberation must have been funny to someone, because the same mirthful laughter rose up all around. He could not help himself when he stomped his foot into the soft soil beneath, and only barely bit back the urge to scream in all their faces.

The glass of wine in his hand was still there. When he glanced down, he saw the rows of sharp teeth that glinted back at him, despite his disgust, his deep-set grimace, and he realised slowly, then all at once that they were the same shape as the dimples left in Taeyong’s bruises. The too-numerous eyes blinked back at him when he did, and he rattled for lack of a better reaction.

Those around him knew he saw, and came to him in droves, lifting him up onto their shoulders. “Our prince is home,” they chanted in unison, raising him above the treetops, their wings fluttering, cacophonous, disruptive. “Our prince is home.”

And when Ten turned to look behind himself, onto the ground, there Taeyong stood, with all the admiration in the world as he clasped his hands before himself. “The prince is home,” his mouth said, though his eyes said nothing at all.

In the howling mountain wind that shrieked louder the higher they rose, Ten felt his own wings, bigger and rounder still than his fellows intent on inducting him into their circle, catch, nearly tear from his body with how weak and paper-thin they were. When they could go no higher, the canopy threatening to choke their united movement, Ten broke out on his own, rising further above them alone than he could have ever done with their help. His back still ached with tearing open, a process he didn’t realise had happened until it was too late; he could feel the pus and blood and fluid trailing down his skin, having burned through his layers one by one.

He gasped, and he cried, and he wished for home, for every glittering thing he should never have denied himself, and let his wings take him wherever home might be, following the song of the mountain that he might get it from his head.

**Author's Note:**

> as always:  
> [twitter](http://twitter.com/appiarian)  
> [cc](http://curiouscat.me/chahakyeon)
> 
> stay safe out there everyone ♥


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